Becoming a narcissist

(Nimue)

I have a very loud neighbour who tends to shout his conversations. His life is clearly falling apart, and he has no idea why. Some days he loudly blames me for how much noise I make. Apparently I read loudly! What happens is never his fault, it’s always down to someone else. He’s on a path, and he does not know it, and he won’t seek help. It’s a common problem.

A lot of mental health problems are caused by stressful and traumatic experiences. While we can act to try and protect ourselves from these, a good attitude will only get you so far if life is grinding you down. Narcissism is entirely different in that it is a state people get into because of the choices they make. That can start with trauma and a desire to protect yourself from further hurt.

No one wants to be uncomfortable or to hear criticism. No one wants to find out they’ve messed up, or got something wrong, or misunderstood. However, we all have to square up to those moments now and then. Handling it well gives us room to fix things, improve and grow. Refusing to be accountable and finding ways to blame someone else instead is the road to madness.

The process of bending reality so that you’re never wrong, creates cognitive dissonance. It can feed paranoia, and the idea that someone else is causing you harm. You can end up believing that a person who is simply flagging up issues, is unfairly attacking you, and that reasonable criticism is actually bullying. A person doesn’t have to get far into this for it to seriously impact on their relationships. You can’t have substantial or sustained relationships if you can’t own your mistakes, and instead make other people responsible for your actions.

Narcissists gaslight other people primarily because they are so involved in lying to themselves. They can cause tremendous damage to others. It is however much easier to escape from a narcissist than it is to live with the consequences of being one. The further a person goes down this route, the more harm they do, the harder it becomes to admit that they’re getting things wrong. That leads to doubling down on mistakes and on justifying ways of behaving. Thus the person doing this to themselves gets ever more detached from reality, and has ever more to lose if they admit what they’ve been doing.

We can protect ourselves from this horrible illness with self-honesty, and self-respect. When you own mistakes you give yourself power to change your life for the better. Embracing opportunities to learn is about developing courage and integrity. Admitting that you’ve fallen flat on your face is honourable.

We can help other people to stay well by being kind in face of error. If we don’t punish each other for honest mistakes, its easier to admit to them. If we help each other to learn and do better, and if this is done kindly then there are fewer reasons to be defensive in the first place. When we see people being blamed unfairly, we can speak up and affirm what’s real.

Narcissism is destructive, and causes huge harm to the person who falls into it. While it is absolutely a condition created by personal choices, that is also informed by the wider culture we live in. If people fear punishment and humiliation when they make honest mistakes, it is harder to act well. There’s also interplay between narcissism and privilege – it’s far more likely to be an issue for people who think they should have everything their own way and that the slightest infringement on that is wholly unfair.

Dealing with double standards

(Nimue)

I’ve come to the conclusion this year that I need to challenge myself round the issue of double standards. It’s something I’m seeing as increasingly problematic, and that I need to change. I’ve a long history of being prone to having double standards, and that needs to stop.

If there’s one rule for one person, and a different rule for someone else, there’s not a lot of scope for fairness and justice.

What I’ve been working with are thought forms like ‘everyone is doing their best’ and ‘if I can fix things then it’s on me to fix things’. What I ask of myself is not what I ask of other people. I think I need to put a lot less pressure on myself, and to hold other people to higher standards.

I want to believe the best of everyone. I get very uncomfortable when that thought is hard to hold. I want to believe that everyone is doing their best – limited by resources, personal struggles etc etc. We’re all doing our best – that seems like a kind and helpful position to hold. Where it falls down is when there’s every reason to think a person could do better and just can’t be bothered or doesn’t see the point. I’m exploring the implications of being a bit less accepting and a bit more willing to hold people to account.

Acceptance is a path that in the short term reduces conflict. It tends to reduce other people’s discomfort at my own expense. It can be a way of supporting and enabling problematic behaviour, and it’s that last element that has me looking hard at my own choices right now. If I let things go, if I make all the problems my problems, and I don’t hold people to the same standards as I hold myself, what am I allowing?

I’ve been thing a lot about my own experiences of other people’s double standards over the years, and how that’s impacted on me. If something matters when it affects someone else, but it doesn’t matter when it’s me being affected, that’s felt really dehumanising. When other people’s mistakes have been forgivable, but mine have not, that’s been painful. I’ve internalised too much of that. The double standards have informed my sense of self worth. It’s a lot to square up to.

I can do better than this. I’m not going to demand supernatural levels of perfection of myself. I’m giving myself permission to be more human, and more whole and from here I’m going to stop saying ‘everyone is doing their best’ to myself when someone hurts me.

Matters of responsibility

(Nimue)

Content warning for abuse.

One of the things I’m working on in myself at the moment is the issue of responsibility. I’m undertaking to change what I consider myself responsible for and this should enable me to dial down anxiety as well.

There are a number of ways a person can end up with problems around responsibility. That includes being made responsible for things you have no power over, being obliged to shoulder more than your fair share of responsibility, and being expected to magically get everything right. It can be an issue in both domestic abuse, and toxic workplaces where responsibility without power can feature heavily. It can also come about as a consequence of dealing with people who cannot manage their own boundaries or who refuse to be accountable.

For me, experience led to a kind of hypervigilance, trying to see problems before they happen and head them off. This isn’t an unusual state to end up in. It’s exhausting and makes it very hard to relax or drop guard if you’re constantly watching out for the next problem in the desperate hope of averting disaster. In normal and healthy situations you can just deal with problems if they arise and figure it out with whoever else is involved. If you don’t have that, then you can end up really struggling with responsibility.

The worst examples involve making victims responsible for the way in which they are being abused. Some abusers will be explicit that the victim is ’making them do it’ – by making them angry, or ‘failing’ in some other way. People who are subjected to a lot of that can end up with really distorted sense of what they are really responsible for, and it takes a lot of unpicking.

We do have responsibility for how we impact on each other. In interactions between functioning adults, that should be balanced and fair, and not result in high levels of anxiety. If one person has to carry too much of the load, that takes a toll.

So I’m learning to better recognise what I’m not responsible for. It’s tricky around other people’s responses to me, because I tend to feel it’s my job to make everyone happy all of the time. That’s something else to unlearn. I’m working on holding boundaries that allow me to feel comfortable, and not to accept responsibility when all I can do with that is feel compromised or ignore my own needs and feelings. I’m learning to make more balanced decisions about how my needs and feelings fit in with what other people want. Or don’t.

Healing is a process, and re-learning takes time. I can only do this because I have the space and the support to examine my own responses. Having permission to say no, is really helpful. In recent weeks, having active encouragement to declare myself not responsible for some things, has really helped me. Situations I would have felt obliged to sort out in the past I am considering not my problem. If things go wrong because I didn’t step in to sort it out, maybe that’s ok. Maybe that will give other people opportunities to learn some new things about handling responsibility.

Trauma and bad choices

(Nimue)

Some people have terrible experiences and get over them without too much trouble, others do not. This is something I’ve thought about a lot, and I have a theory that one of the differences may be whether you feel that you could have done differently.

Sometimes there are no good choices. Whatever a person does in Gaza right now, they cannot act in ways that will keep them safe. No amount of planning, assessing, trying will make any difference. We humans are drawn to looking for patterns and explanations, and things we can do to shift the odds in our favour. Sometimes this serves us well. When you only have bad options, you can’t make good choices.

In war, this kind of powerlessness is caused deliberately. In situations of natural disaster, people can be overwhelmed in much the same way. It’s not hard to see the temptation to blame angry gods, just to have an explanation and the small feeling of control that gives you.

In cases of abuse, the victim is often actively encouraged to see what’s happening as their fault. That keeps you focused on your own behaviour and shortcomings, and on trying to do better so as not to provoke cruel responses. But of course if you are being abused, you’re being set up to fail and will never be good enough.

When you think you are the problem, it is very hard to trust yourself. Hyper-vigilance and anxiety follow. Just because something seems ok doesn’t mean you can trust it to still be ok in an hour’s time. You learn to be afraid of yourself, afraid of ‘mistakes’ and that anything less than perfection will be dangerous. Of course what constitutes perfection will vary so there’s no way of winning at that.

When we can’t take risks and make mistakes, we can’t grow, or heal. To recover from trauma you have to be able to trust, and to live. Taking action is really hard when you are paralysed by the fear of mistakes. The very things that offer ways out of a trauma legacy are made threatening by the impact of trauma, and this is a hard trap to break out of.

I look at the ways in which governments demonise migrants – people who are often fleeing from horror. I think about the ways in which the people of Gaza are being blamed for the genocide being carried out there. I think about how sick and disabled people are blamed for things they have no control over. There’s a lot of state-led trauma going on in the world.

My own experience of trauma and healing has shown me that my sense of what I am to blame for has been really important. Learning not to feel responsible for things I had no control over has been a difficult process. Having peace and safe space, and support with rethinking things has made so much odds to me. Peace is essential for healing. And yet collectively we want to treat people fleeing warzones as criminals.

Kindness isn’t hard, and it does so much good. Yet so many people choose cruelty instead, and indifference to the suffering of others. I remain mystified by this.

Panic and healing

(Nimue)

What can you do in face of overwhelming panic – be that your own or someone else’s? When I sought medical support, I ended with a handbook full of thing to do to manage mild anxiety. I was unable to persuade my doctor that I was experiencing panic to a far worse degree than that. I’ve seen helpful apps that work much the same way and very little that would do anything for the kind of panic that feels like drowning.

Here are some things I have learned…

Get out of the situation and get to somewhere you feel safe. That might mean having the space to have your own feelings while you work them through. If you’ve triggered into something historical, the key thing to keep saying to yourself is ‘I am not there now.’ Say it out loud, let yourself hear it.

My worst experiences of panic comes up around making mistakes or feeling that I’ve got things wrong. I suspect this isn’t unusual – abuse so often includes victim blaming. Being punished for errors and mistakes as though you are being deliberately useless or uncooperative leaves marks. I am allowed to make mistakes. I am allowed to be human. No one is perfect. I cannot magically know everything. These are good thoughts to hold.

What’s helped me most is hearing those affirmations. My partner Keith has been brilliant at supporting me though panic attacks. He sits with me, reminds me that I am safe, and loved. He tends to help reduce my sense of the size of the problem, rather than making me feel like I’ve over-reacted. He tells me that I’m good enough, doing well, and things of that ilk. This comes from a substantial understanding of how and why I panic. When someone else takes the time to understand, that’s really powerful.

Affirmations are good in face of panic. There’s a balance to strike around supporting a person without minimising what’s happening. Reassurance and kindness in face of panic gets a lot done. Even if what’s going on makes no sense to you, affirming that you care, and want to help, and mean to help the panicking person get things under control, is powerful.

Doing and saying nothing is not a good response. It leaves space in which the person suffering from panic can plug in all of their fears unchallenged. Small affirmations of care and support are enough to stop that happening, or to at least help keep it under control.

I used to have panic attacks that went on for hours, often over days at a time. At this point they don’t last anything like as long. Keith’s affirmations come up for me even when he isn’t present, and that helps me cope. A lot of people who struggle with poor mental health have voices in their heads – critical, abusive, destructive voices from the past. Countering that works. It’s something to know regardless of whether you’re dealing with this personally. Any time we approach each other with warmth and affirmation we’re potentially giving someone else the means to fight their demons.

Learning how to be sad

(Nimue)

When you suffer from depression or anxiety, the messages you often get from both medical and spiritual sources are much the same. Your feelings are the problem. Learn to change your thoughts and feelings and you will be cured. That’s never helped me, and I know other people who struggle and have not been able to fix themselves either.

What this leads to is treating your ‘negative’ emotions as suspect, and perhaps even trying to fight or suppress them. That’s very hard work. It’s also at odds with much of what we know about mental health, because suppressing things tends to make matters worse, not better in the long run.

I can trace all of my mental health issues to things I’ve experienced. There’s nothing weird about being anxious when you’re dealing with something that scares you. There’s nothing weird about being sad if you’re suffering. These are natural, normal responses to distress. However, we tend to pathologise grief and distress, and there’s a big economic dimension to that.. 

What would happen if we treated these kinds of mental illnesses as things that had been caused, not as personal failings or brain chemistry malfunctions? What if we assumed a person was most likely having a reasonable response to an unreasonable situation? Rather than medicated them, we’d have to fix the problem. Poverty, abuse, toxic workplaces and insecurity would explain a great deal of this. What would happen if we tackled mental health as a social issue for everyone, not a medical problem for some?

Imagine if workplace health and safety included not being allowed to stress people to the point of making them sick. This would include paying people enough that they could afford to live decent, healthy lives. Imagine the mental health benefits of universal basic income and how many people that would liberate from constant stress.

This winter I’ve been experimenting with taking myself seriously. If I feel sad, I no longer try to fight it. If I’m anxious, or stressed, I give that some space. This might result in a few tears, but I find when I do that, the distress passes and I get on top of my feelings. I had to remind myself repeatedly that with my partner going through some scary and unpleasant stuff, it was reasonable to feel sad and worried. This was nothing disproportionate or inappropriate in how I was responding to that.

I’m having to learn how to be sad about things. It’s taking practice not to see fear or sorrow as a sign that my mental health is falling apart and that I should be fighting to cope better. Making the space for what I’m feeling results in coping far better than trying to cope does. The less I try to tough things out, the more resilient I am. It still feels paradoxical, but it definitely works. Part of this is about not seeing myself as the problem, but shifting my understanding of what I’m dealing with. Being upset by upsetting things is not an illness. I’ve had to deal with a lot of awful stuff along the way, that’s all.

If you start from the idea that how you feel is a fair response to what you’re dealing with, you don’t invalidate yourself. You don’t end up mistrusting your feelings or habitually treating yourself like you are the problem. When the problem is not inside your head, you can’t fix it by changing how you think, and going that route can take you away from the real-world solutions that would genuinely help.

Trust and Healing

(Nimue)

One of the things that has become apparent to me over the winter is the significance of self-trust for mental health. Learning to trust myself has been a key part of my healing process. After many years of suffering mental/emotional anguish I’m now in a much better state. A lot of mental health advice centres on the idea that the sufferer’s wonky thinking is the problem and they could be fixed if only they thought about things differently. This has never worked for me, because my mental health issues have been caused by things that have happened. I didn’t need to change my thinking, I needed to not be continually hurt.

Not being able to trust myself was a major contributor to the considerable depression and anxiety I used to suffer with. I did not get there by myself. Not being taken seriously was a major factor. Flagging things that were harming me and not being believed or having that acted on made me mistrust myself. If you are regularly treated as though you make no sense, or want unreasonable things it really undermines self confidence.

My instincts are good. My reasoning is solid. My feelings and needs are not especially outrageous. I know what I need. When I’m allowed to have what I need to function, I function pretty damn well. It’s taken me a while to feel able to say all of this, but I have learned to trust myself and to trust that I really do know what’s best for me.

We’re all very susceptible to how the people around us treat us. Much of this relates to how we all handle difference. If someone is reacting differently to how you would, that doesn’t make them wrong, or a drama-llama. It doesn’t make you wrong, either. There are reasons why things impact differently on different people. For example, men are often unable to see why women find some situations threatening – because they are safe situations for men. People who have experienced trauma are often responding in a way that is totally proportional to their traumatic experiences, even if it doesn’t make much sense to anyone else.

There’s a lot that we can all do to avoid needlessly invalidating each other. Simply accepting that other people experience things differently is a really good thing to take on. Allowing people to talk about their difficulties is good, too. Shutting people down because what they say makes you uncomfortable adds to the problems I’m describing. It’s a very common experience for people who are struggling to be told to shut up by people who are fine and do not want to hear anything troubling. If you don’t have the resources to respond to someone else’s struggles there are plenty of ways of handling that kindly. In my experience it’s not under-resourced people who tend to be cruel in this way. It’s people who expect everything they encounter to revolve around them.

Kindness gets a lot done. Saying things like ‘I am sorry you are having a hard time’ can be a powerful, supportive move. “I don’t really understand what’s going on here but I recognise that you are struggling. If there’s anything I can do to help, please tell me,” is a gift to someone. “Shut up, you’re making me uncomfortable and I’m sick of how miserable you are,” is going to make things worse for the other person. “That can’t be true,” is incredibly destructive.

Never under-estimate the power of small acts of kindness. A warm word, or just hearing and witnessing can make a lot of odds. Treating people as valid is something that enables healing. Telling people they shouldn’t feel the way they do can actually make a person less able to trust themselves, and consequently, more unwell.

Mental health problems exist in contexts. Healing depends on having the space to heal.

Having better mental health

(Nimue)

Here we are at the end of Keith’s six week cancer treatment. Both of us worn and tired, both of us doing far better than anyone expected. I’m not going to be talking much about Keith’s experiences – he’s shared that with friends on Facebook, I’ve been bringing things to the blog that we both thought might be useful to other people.

Ahead of Keith’s treatment we were both worried about how I would cope. My mental health has been a lot better since we’ve been living together, but this was always going to be a very stressful thing to get through and there was the risk it would wipe out whatever had fixed me. We did not know what exactly had made the critical differences. We know now. I went into this afraid that my mental health issues would make me a liability. What I’ve learned has been really surprising.

I had a few wobbles along the way but no more than you’d really expect from a person whose beloved is dealing with cancer. I was an asset, not an additional problem. I was able to do a lot to keep Keith’s spirits up and to help him cope. My experience of physical illness, depression and anxiety meant I had knowledge to draw on that proved useful. I know how to push through difficult things.

I’ve had to radically reassess who I think I am. I’ve turned out to be strong, resilient and supportive, not the fragile nuisance I thought I was. This is a very big deal for me in terms of self-esteem, confidence, and my ability to trust myself.

In the past there were a lot of years when I suffered burnout, meltdowns, overwhelming depression, overwhelming panic and ongoing distress. I thought that was me. I thought that was because of historic trauma, failure to recover, intrinsic weakness, and that there was nothing anyone could possibly do about it. I used to have appalling mental health collapses at least once a month, it was exhausting and horrible. The last few months have been stressful and difficult. I have had panic attacks and there have been slides into depression, but nothing I couldn’t handle. A pretty reasonable response to the circumstances. I’m not the mad, broken person I thought I was.

I’ve found out what makes the most critical difference and what it is I can’t do without. I struggle a lot with being under-stimulated. I need physical contact for my brain to function properly. I just need to be held. Maybe more than average, but not a preposterous amount. If I have a panic attack, and I’m held, I calm down. If I’m depressed, and I’m held, I cope. It’s absolutely reliable. After many years of struggling, it is a surprise to me to discover that the answers to my issues are so simple.I’m not the difficult, high maintenance person I thought I was.

Keith is the sort of person who, facing cancer treatment, worried about everyone else. He’s a remarkably kind and thoughtful soul, and was determined that I would not get into difficulty while all this was going on for him. Between us, we figured out what it takes to keep me entirely well and functional – precious insight that changes everything for me. From here we have ongoing work to do keeping him well and dealing with recovery and whatever comes next. This is a five year process, at least. Still, a corner has been turned and from here we’re very much focused on what we can do, and not just for each other.

Everyday romance

(Nimue)

I used to say I wasn’t romantic. I don’t like capitalism dressed up as romance, and I don’t like anything reinforcing gender norms and sexual stereotyping. I don’t like cut flowers flown in from South Africa. I hate performative stuff and this is one of those days where people do showy things because it’s what you’re supposed to do.

I did draw a rose, though. I did three hearts this year – one with tentacles for the Hopeless, Maine project, one with toadstools because goblins, and this one. This one’s arguably a bit romantic.

It turns out that what I find romantic, is attention. It’s spending time with someone when you’re really focused on each other and invested in what you’re jointly doing or sharing. It’s being present together in a joyful way, delighting in each other. Doing things that are very much about sharing the experience rather than just happening to be doing the same stuff.

In the last year or so, I’ve learned a lot about myself. The things I didn’t like are still things I don’t like. Deep sharing of experiences and co-creating life feels romantic to me, and intimate and soulful in ways that I turn out to love. Where this has been most powerful for me has often been around the sharing of time in landscapes. Which is not unrelated to the Druidry. My love for landscape is a big part of me, and of how Druidry works for me. Being able to share that in a soulful way works for me on so many levels.

I’m very into love as a verb (thanks to Halo Quin for this notion). Love as what we do rather than it existing primarily as an idea or a feeling. In the shared doing, there is magic and joy. Love as something expressed in ways that feel tangible. Love in the small, everyday gestures and in the commitment to sharing time and life in meaningful ways. 

Valentine’s Day finds us with two more days to go of Keith’s cancer treatment. It’s a strange time.  I have never felt more loved, and it turns out that the experience of romance for me is all about everyday attention and sharing, and the richness this has brought into my life.

Long term illness and sense of self

(Nimue)

Long term illness and developing disabilities impacts on a person’s sense of self. It costs you things that were part of you and is likely to be disorientating and distressing. One of the most reliable casualties is the ability to work. For many people, identity and work are deeply linked. UK culture is cruel towards people who can’t work, adding shame and humiliation to the mix for many.

Long term illness impacts on our social lives, our home lives, our relationships with family and community. The scope for physical activity diminishes. Life becomes narrower, and those losses bring grief that also has to be dealt with

When it comes to mental health, hanging on to something of yourself as you face other challenges is really important. For Druids there are a lot of things that you can do while sitting down, or even lying down, but the loss of outside time, and community gatherings can be harsh. For spiritual people there can be issues around feeling pressured to find meaning in the loss, or coming to doubt your spiritual path because of it. The more invested you’ve been in the idea that you can magically have whatever you want, the bigger a blow it is when your body inevitably malfunctions. Sooner or later, we all will. Old age will get us if nothing else does.

It helps to know what in your life is important for your sense of self. That makes it easier to prioritise. It helps to think about these things – trying to pretend there isn’t a problem doesn’t get much done. Working out what you can hold on to, and focusing on that, is a good idea. You don’t have to be stoiacal about it, or saintly in your resignation, you don’t have to accept what’s happening or be grateful for it as a learning opportunity. It is totally ok to be angry, sad, frustrated and feel all of your feelings. It’s not unspiritual to resent the loss of things that mattered to you.

Whatever else you can or can’t do, you can always let yourself feel your feelings. That’s the biggest part of hanging onto a sense of self. It doesn’t matter what other people would find convenient, or what you think you’re supposed to feel. Make room for what you’ve got – which is likely to be messy. Being strong doesn’t mean avoiding your fear or grief. You can be pragmatic and still have space for howling. Suppressing emotion costs a great deal in terms of both effort and wellbeing. Having space for whatever you’re feeling is likely to help you cope far better than trying to put a brave face on things will.

Sometimes life is a bit shit. Terrible things happen for no good reason. There aren’t always meaningful lessons to learn. All you can ever do is try to make the best of what you’ve been dealt. You do not have to be defined by any of it – unless you want to be, and that’s fine too.